She moved towards the house and the Duke, repressing an impulse to follow her, waited to thank the Vicar for his services and to see that the grave was properly filled in.
There were no mourners to whom he must be affable, for the only people who had followed the coffin as it was carried from the Chapel to the private graveyard, were Benedicta, himself, Hawkins and Jackson. The two valets had stood a little apart and there was therefore actually at the grave only Benedicta and the Duke.
He thought that she would wish to hide her tears and he hoped when she reached her bedroom, where he supposed she was going, Mrs. Newall would be there to minister to her.
The Duke offered the Vicar some refreshment which he refused as he had another Service to take in the village.
Then he was free to go back to the house and wonder how soon it would be possible to see Benedicta and to talk to her.
He went to the library where the morning newspapers were waiting for him, but instead of picking them up he walked around the room restlessly, as if he could not settle.
He felt now as if the last two days he had existed in a kind of No Man’s Land, having to force himself to wait impatiently before he could do what he wished to do or indeed to take any action that was of any significance.
All the time his thoughts had been with Benedicta and he knew that nothing else was of any consequence besides her and the future he was determined to arrange for her.
“Luncheon is served, Your Grace!”
The butler’s voice from the door startled the Duke.
He had not realised it was time for the meal and he knew that in fact he was not hungry.
Once again, as he walked towards the big dining room he thought how irritating it was to eat alone.
“Miss Benedicta’s luncheon has been sent upstairs?” he asked the butler as he settled himself.
“Yes, Your Grace. The chef has made a real effort, if I may say so, to tempt the young lady’s appetite.”
The Duke nodded, but thought that like himself Benedicta would not be hungry.
‘I must talk to her,’ he determined. ‘It would be ridiculous for her to lapse into a depression and despondency because of her father’s death.’
He thought that the sooner she discarded the black garments she had worn at the funeral, the better.
Not that they had not become her – he found himself remembering how white her skin had seemed and he thought that, if he had been able to see them, her eyes would have appeared larger and more arresting in her face than they had ever done before.
‘I shall persuade her to dine with me tonight,’ he decided and sipped the excellent wine that was in his glass without tasting it.
He wanted to send for Benedicta as soon as he had finished his meal, but then he thought that would be tactless.
It would also be uncomfortable if she refused to come to him.
Instead he forced himself to go to the stables where he had a long talk with his Head Groom about certain improvements he wished to make in his bloodstock.
He also agreed to several alterations in the buildings which were overdue because he had shelved them as being unnecessary.
All this took quite a long time and when he returned to the house, it was nearly four o’clock.
He decided that he would visit Richard, thinking at the same time that Benedicta might be with him.
He walked up the stairs and, as he turned towards Richard’s bedroom, he heard someone behind him and found that it was Mrs. Newall.
“Your Grace!” she said breathlessly as if she had been hurrying.
“What is it?” the Duke asked.
“This is for you, Your Grace,” she said handing him a note. “I found it in Miss Benedicta’s bedroom.”
“You found it?” the Duke repeated.
As he took the note from Mrs. Newall’s hand, he had a strange feeling that he did not wish to open it.
He was sure that it carried ill tidings that he had no wish to hear, but because the housekeeper was waiting, he knew there was nothing else he could do.
He opened the thick white paper that was engraved with his crest.
For a moment Benedicta’s handwriting seemed to swim before his eyes and it was hard to read what she had written.
Then he read,
“Your Grace, I can only thank you with all my heart for your kindness to my father. I can never be grateful enough that on his last days on earth you did everything that was possible for him and his funeral was something I shall never forget.
I can only express my gratitude to Your Grace by saying I shall always remember you in my prayers.
Yours respectfully,
Benedicta Calvine.”
After he had finished reading what Benedicta had written, the Duke stood staring at the piece of paper he held in his hand as if it was hard for him to realise exactly what it said.
Then, as he knew that Mrs. Newall was waiting, he asked,
“Where is Miss Benedicta?”
“She’s gone, Your Grace. I think, in fact, she must have left immediately after the funeral.”
“Why should you think that?” the Duke demanded and his voice was so harsh that it seemed to echo back at him.
“The luncheon tray that was brought downstairs from her room was untouched, Your Grace.”
“How could she have gone?” the Duke asked angrily. “Surely someone must have seen her go?”
“That is what I asked myself, Your Grace, but, if she left by the side door while the staff were at luncheon, it’s unlikely anyone would have been about the passages.”
The Duke realised that this was true.
The staff ate soon after noon, before luncheon was served in the dining room, and it was always a time when the whole house seemed quiet and deserted.
“Miss Benedicta must have ordered a carriage?” he said at length.
“I think not, Your Grace. She took nothing with her.”
“What do you mean – she took nothing with her?”
Mrs. Newall seemed to pause a moment before she answered,
“From all I can ascertain, Your Grace, she was wearing the gown she first came here in. I wish now I’d thrown it away, but she wouldn’t let me.”
“The gown she first came here in,” the Duke repeated.
He remembered the threadbare grey gown in which Benedicta had first appeared and to which she had added a Quaker-like little white collar the first night she had dined with him and Bevil Haverington.
“It is absurd! Ridiculous!” he exclaimed. “I cannot believe that this has happened.”
“I’m afraid it’s the truth, Your Grace,” Mrs. Newall said, “and the only thing Miss Benedicta has taken with her is a pair of new shoes. I destroyed the ones she came in as they’d holes in the soles and weren’t fit for a scarecrow.”
The Duke stood thinking.
Then without another word to Mrs Newall, he turned and walked down the passage towards Richard’s room.
He found Richard sitting in the window reading the newspaper.
He looked up eagerly as the Duke entered, but the expression on his face changed and it was obvious he had expected someone else.
“Hello, Cousin Nolan!” he said after a moment. “How did the funeral go? I hoped Benedicta would come and tell me about it.”
“Where is Benedicta?” the Duke asked abruptly.
“Where is she?” Richard questioned. “I have no idea. I thought she would be with you.”
“She has left the house! Did she tell you about it?”
“Left?” Richard exclaimed in surprise.
Then there was an expression on his face that made the Duke say,
“You knew she was going? She confided in you?”
“No, I had no idea she meant to leave, at least – ”
“Tell me what you know. You are hiding something from me!” the Duke asserted accusingly.
“I am not,” Richard replied, “but, if she has gone, I know why.”
“Why?”
The question was like a pistol shot.
“Because you told her she had to marry me and she has no wish to do so.”
“She could have discussed it with me without running away in this absurd manner,” the Duke objected.
“Would you have listened?” Richard asked.
The Duke did not reply.
Then after a moment he said,
“You had an idea she might leave. Did she tell you where she would go?”
“No. She did not tell me exactly what she intended to do,” Richard replied. “She merely said she would think of something and this is what she must have meant.”
“I will fetch her back.”
“What would be the point?” Richard asked. “She will not do what you ask, and besides, although I like Benedicta very much, I don’t want to marry her either.”
The Duke said nothing and after a moment Richard added,
“You could hardly expect me to, considering she is in love with you!”
There was a moment of silence and the expression on the Duke’s face made Richard draw in his breath.
Then surprisingly he said in a quiet and different tone of voice,
“What makes you think that?”
“It was obvious from the way she looked at you and when I asked her – she did not deny it.”
The Duke did not speak and after a moment Richard said bravely,
“I told her that you had sworn never to marry, but she understood – as you refuse to do – that neither of us could marry anyone unless we were in love.”
“Are you sure Benedicta is in love with me?” the Duke quizzed him, still in the quiet voice he had used before.
“It would be extraordinary if she were not!” Richard observed defiantly. “Most women seem ready to chuck their heart at your feet. But Benedicta is different, so I expect it means more to her than it does to the rest of them.”
“Yes, Benedicta is different – ” the Duke agreed and walked from the room.
*
It was four hours later when the Duke began to be really worried.
He had thought at first that it would be quite easy for him to find Benedicta, as he was certain that she would go North.
He reckoned that if she had started out after the funeral, as Mrs. Newall had suggested, she would still be on the Kingswood estate unless she had been able to walk more quickly than he calculated that she could.
He had the idea that unless she intended to take a stagecoach, that he was sure she could not afford, she would keep to the fields and off the main highways.
At the same time, as she drew nearer to London, she would inevitably find her way intersected by lanes and roads, where the Duke knew she would be in danger.
There were beggars, footpads, cut-throats, and raffish characters of all sorts and descriptions, who would constitute a definite danger to a young girl as beautiful as Benedicta travelling by herself.
The Duke had ridden his horse at a tremendous speed for the first part of the afternoon.
Because he knew he had a wide area to traverse he had zigzagged his way backwards and forwards so as to cover every route leading Northwards that Benedicta might have chosen.
There was not only pasture and fields sown with crops, to traverse, there were woods and copses, barren land covered with shrubs and even swamps that were the breeding ground for snipe but little use for anything else.
It was one thing to ride over them, but the Duke was aware that they were far more difficult for a traveller on foot. He was sure that Benedicta would not be able to travel at all fast, yet he had crossed the brow of the last hill overlooking the Northern border of his estate without a sign of her.
He was now passing through a small valley and he wondered where he could look next.
All the afternoon, every minute that he was riding in search of Benedicta, the Duke had been facing the truth that, if he did not find her again, he would have lost everything that mattered to him in his life.
It had taken a long time for him to be honest and admit to himself, that what he felt for Benedicta was not the consideration and affection of a Guardian, but the love of a man for a woman.
He had been so positive for so many years that he would never love any woman enough to need her permanently in his life, that he had fought every inch of the way against his own feelings, his own inclinations, the cry of his own heart.
But he knew now that he could no longer go on pretending and he had to face the fact that he was in love, wildly in love in a way that he could not deny.
He had tried ever since meeting Benedicta to go on telling himself that he would never marry anyone, that no woman should bear his name and that he would remain, as he had always averred, a bachelor to his dying day.
Now he admitted that he wanted Benedicta as a part of himself, as his wife – and the mother of his children.
He had been two years younger than Richard when he had vowed that he would never marry and that no woman should, as his wife, make a fool of him or defame his name.
It was shock that had made him feel like that – shock that had made him grow almost instantaneously from an idealistic adolescent boy into a bitter resentful man.
He could remember all too vividly the evening when he had come home unexpectedly from Oxford, thinking what a delightful surprise it would be for his parents.
He had, as usual, bought a present for his mother, for he never returned home without bringing her one and he knew how her eyes would light up with pleasure when she saw what he carried.
She would raise her face to his for a kiss and say in her lilting voice, which always made her seem just as young as he was,
“How heavenly of you, Nolan darling, to think of me, and of course it is just what I wanted. How could you have been so clever!”
He had arrived home at nearly ten o’clock.
His home in those days was a house in Hampshire where his father bred horses that never won a race but gave him a great deal of pleasure.
The old butler whom Nolan had known since a child, was obviously surprised when he saw who was at the door.
“Why have you come home, Master Nolan?” he enquired. “We weren’t expecting you for another three days.”
“Yes, I know, Bates,” Nolan had answered, “but I have finished my exams and there was no point in my staying on with nothing to do. Where is Papa?”
“He’s at Newmarket, Master Nolan, and won’t be home till tomorrow.”
“Oh, how disappointing! I wanted to surprise him,” Nolan had said. “And where is my mother?”
The old butler obviously hesitated before he replied,
“Now you go up to your room and tidy yourself up, Master Nolan, and I’ll tell the Mistress you’re here.”
“You will do nothing of the sort, Bates! I want to surprise her and, if you want something to do, you can get me something to eat. I have been travelling for hours and I am extremely hungry.”
He did not wait to hear the butler’s reply, but hurried up the stairs three steps at a time and ran along the corridor which led to his mother’s bedroom.
She and his father occupied the Master Suite on the South side of the house.
There was a large bedroom, a dressing room and a boudoir that Nolan had always thought ever since he was a child was the most beautiful room in the house.
It was where his mother kept her treasures, it was where she wrote her letters, sewed, and where she had read to Nolan as they sat together on the sofa.
It was there he could talk to her, telling her confidences, revealing his thoughts and feelings and sometimes shyly reading her the poems he wrote and which he would never have shown to anybody else.
He reached the door and paused for a moment.
Then assuring himself that the present for his mother was safely tucked under his arm, he swept the dark hair back from his forehead so that he would appear tidy and as handsome as she liked him to look.
He opened the door quietly
.
He thought perhaps she would be sitting in front of the fire as she often did, sometimes wearing only a lace trimmed negligée in which he thought, with her hair falling over her shoulders, she looked like an angel.
He saw by the light of a few candles that were lit in the room, that she was not there.
There was, however, a fragrance of flowers and the scent of roses which he always associated with his mother.
‘She will be in bed,’ Nolan told himself.
He thought with a smile that if she was asleep, he would awaken her with a kiss so that she would open her eyes in surprise to see him beside her.
He walked quietly across the room, but as he neared the communicating door which led into the bedroom, he heard voices.
‘So Papa is back!’ he thought in surprise. ‘I wonder why Bates thought he was returning tomorrow?’
Then he heard his mother say,
“Oh, Bernard! I love you! You know I love you!”
“My darling, my sweet! There is no one in the world as beautiful as you!” a man’s voice replied. “If only I could keep you with me for ever!”
Nolan had stood as if turned to stone.
He had known immediately who Bernard was. He had known too that the last time he had been at home he had been very blind and very childish not to realise what was happening.
But that his mother should do this, was so unbelievable, that he felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart.
He had worshipped her, not only for her beauty, but for her mind, for her understanding, and because she personified everything that was pure, perfect and beyond reproach.
Every woman he had ever met or seen he compared to her and found them wanting.
But now his mother was no better than the actresses about whom his undergraduate friends sniggered or the prostitutes who solicited young men like himself, when he walked back at night to his College.
His mother! His mother!
He had turned quietly and left the boudoir and, when he reached his own room, he had sworn that he would never marry!
He would never be deceived by a woman and would never believe in one again or in the love they talked about so glibly but which was only another name for lust.
He had never spoken to a soul of what he had discovered and, as soon as he left Oxford, he had gone into a Regiment and had been glad it kept him away from his mother and father.
The Duke & the Preachers Daughter Page 12